Esquemas eficientes de comunicação digital e analógica com diversidade espacial e cooperativa

Abstract

In this thesis we discuss spatial diversity and cooperative diversity techniques for two types of wireless communication systems: digital systems and analog systems. In the context of digital systems, we consider the transmission between nodes of a wireless sensor network. Since these networks are characterized by a large number of nodes, with limited amount of energy, we focus on efficient schemes from the point of view of the energy consumption. For this purpose, we analyze cooperative protocols and multiple antenna techniques trying to delineate the real effectiveness of these techniques in practical wireless sensor networks scenarios, where we consider issues such as line of sight, the energy consumption of the transmit and receive circuits, the availability or not of a feedback channel, packet loss and delay constraints, and possible nonlinearities in the battery consumption. Our results show that some of the conclusions of the literature can change if some of these parameters are taken into account. Furthermore, we detail the most efficient operation regions for each transmission method in such networks. On the other hand, in the context of analog systems, we consider analog joint source-channel coding systems performing bandwidth compression. Such systems are suitable for scenarios in which the complexity and delay can be limiting factors. In this case, we first apply some of the already existing concepts of the literature to the context of wireless channels, and then focus on cooperative schemes and multiple antenna techniques to reduce the distortion at the receiver, while trying to approximate the performance of these systems to their theoretical limit. Our results show a performance improvement when spatial and cooperative diversity are used. Moreover, the proposed analog solution approaches the upper bound performance of a practical digital system, with the advantage of lower complexity and delay, and more flexibility in the system design.